February, 7, 2005 archives

james gosling, who inflicted java on the world, had some interesting things to say about open-source companies:

Open source vendors also came under fire, with Gosling sideswiping MySQL, JBoss, and Red Hat: “They say that they are running their businesses based on services.

“These businesses are more hype than reality. If they don’t have a [longer term] economic model…they are going to have a really hard time.”

apparently he didn’t get the memo.

but i guess if anyone would be an expert on companies that lack financial viability, it would be an executive at sun.

i also love the other juxtaposition in the article: mysql isn’t open source because “no one is allowed to do check-ins,” but java is open-source, because the source has always been available.

the founder of go daddy has a blog where he says something very interesting about their super bowl advertising: “There was also one other benefit -- it’s tax deductible, so the Federal and State governments will pay a little more than 38% of the cost.”

advertising is tax deductible? what kind of insanity is that?

while i like the spoof-the-censors spirit of the commercial, i have to say i found it pretty weak, even in the extended version.

congrats to mark fletcher and the bloglines team on being acquired by ask jeeves.

once upon a time, a business development person at ask jeeves called me to talk about blo.gs. as i recall, the gist of the conversation from my side was that the site made no money, i spent no time on it, and there really wasn’t much to it.

this is another of those obvious-in-retrospect services that i can now kick myself for not building. having the vision, courage, and patience to execute on the idea is the hard part, of course.

at last year’s foo camp, when the limping feedmesh thing kicked off, someone suggested that we set up a yahoo group for discussion, and i made some comment about preferring something “more real.” a funny thing to say when one of the guys who built it (mark) was in the room. but in hindsight, i’m glad nobody wasted the time trying to create anything more real.

who’s next? i would think pubsub.com would be a likely acquisition for someone.

i also find this acquisition funny because there was a time when i almost ended up working at ask jeeves because i knew the ceo at the time. i got an early-morning call (or what was early-morning for me those days) where i agreed to fly up to interview, but i turned around a few hours later and cancelled, once i was awake and realized that i had no desire to work at a place using iis and asp, or relocate to the bay area.